Utah Beach, and the road to Strasbourg

9th August 2026. Fujifilm X-T2, XF18-55mm.

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Last of three, and the one that surprised me.

I’d gone to Utah expecting the American story — landing craft, engineers, the fourth beach and the easy one. What I came away with was a French story, and I didn’t work that out until I got the photographs onto a screen and started reading the writing on things.

Utah is really two stops about three kilometres apart. The first is La Madeleine, in the commune of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, where the museum is and where the 4th Infantry Division came ashore on 6 June 1944. The second is Les Dunes de Varreville, up the road in Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, where General Leclerc’s 2e Division Blindée landed on 1 August 1944. Same beach. Two different armies, two months apart, and two entirely different sets of badges on the monuments.

The engineers, and the seahorse

There’s a landing craft on the sand with its ramp down, and if you climb in and shoot back out of it you get the three bronze soldiers walking away up the beach — which is what everybody who came off one of these actually saw. It’s the only frame I took all day that I’d call properly composed rather than found.

H-Hour at Utah was 06:30. Two things about this beach that are worth knowing: the landing came ashore about 2,000 yards south of where it was supposed to, because the control vessels were lost and the tide pushed everything sideways — and it turned out to be a stroke of luck, because the sector they hit was far less strongly defended. And it was cheap, by the standards of that day. The 4th Division took 197 casualties at Utah — killed, wounded and missing — with about sixty more men lost at sea. At Omaha the figure was around 2,400.

(You’ll see Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr’s line quoted everywhere — “We’ll start the war from right here!” — after he realised they’d landed in the wrong place. It isn’t in the US Army’s official history, and I can’t find a first-hand witness for it anywhere. Lovely line. Treat it as tradition rather than transcript.)

What you find all over this end of the beach is a seahorse. It’s the badge of the 1st Engineer Special Brigade — the outfit that ran the beach itself. Not the assault troops: the men who came in behind them and turned a strip of sand into a working port, marking the exits, clearing the obstacles, moving vehicles and stores off the sand, and carrying the wounded back out.

Their monument stands on top of a German shelter and was inaugurated on 6 June 1945, a year to the day after the landing, by the brigade’s own commander. It’s one of the oldest liberation memorials in Europe. Round the base, a plaque from the commune: 6 juin 1944 — à nos libérateurs — la commune de Sainte-Marie-du-Mont reconnaissante.

And then this, which is the one that got me. A white marker at the roadside:

ROWE ROAD — IN HONOR OF PVT J. T. ROWE, 531st ENGR. SHORE REGT. — KILLED IN ACTION JUNE 6th 1944

Same seahorse at the bottom. Rowe was a private in the 531st Engineer Shore Regiment, the 1st Brigade’s own shore regiment, and he was killed on the first day.

The brigade’s commander, Colonel Eugene Caffey, started nailing wooden boards to signposts that summer with the names of his own dead on them — forty-five of the ninety-six the brigade lost. He designed the proper panels in the autumn. Michelin remade them in concrete in 1958. There are something like ninety of them across seven communes, and they’re being restored right now. Every beach exit and side road round here is named after somebody who didn’t get off it.

The tall pale pylon in the dunes is the Utah Beach American Memorial, dedicated on 6 June 1984 by General J. Lawton Collins, who had commanded VII Corps here forty years earlier, in front of seven heads of state. It commemorates the whole corps — the beachhead, the drive across the Cotentin, the capture of Cherbourg — rather than just the landing. Sainte-Marie-du-Mont gave the land to the United States in perpetuity.

The oath, and the road

Three kilometres north the badges change. The seahorse disappears and everything starts carrying a map of France with the Cross of Lorraine laid over it.

This is another Signal Monument — the same family as the one in the square at Sainte-Mère-Église and the one at Omaha. It carries two dates at once: the Allied landings of 6 June, and Leclerc’s arrival on 1 August with the 2e Division Blindée. The division was some sixteen thousand men and five thousand vehicles, and it came ashore here across the turn of the month.

And low down on the plinth, easy to miss, there’s a small plaque that turns the whole afternoon into a different story:

SERMENT FAIT À KOUFRA PAR LE GÉNÉRAL LECLERC ET SES GARS DE LA 2e DIVISION BLINDÉE LE 1er MARS 1941

« Jurons de ne déposer les armes que lorsque nos couleurs, nos belles couleurs, flotteront sur la cathédrale de Strasbourg. »

The Oath of Koufra. In the Libyan desert in 1941, Leclerc and a few hundred men took an Italian fort at an oasis called Koufra, raised the French flag over it, and swore not to lay down their arms until the flag flew again over Strasbourg cathedral — which was then about three thousand kilometres and nearly four years away, on the other side of a continent they did not hold one inch of.

He kept it. Strasbourg was liberated by the 2e DB on 23 November 1944, and Leclerc issued an order of the day the next morning: le serment de Koufra est tenu.

I love this plaque, and I have to tell you it’s wrong three times over. Most accounts date the oath to 2 March, the day after the fort surrendered — though the 2e DB’s own veterans’ association sticks with the 1st. Leclerc was a colonel in 1941, not a general. And the 2e Division Blindée did not exist: in March 1941 he had a Free French desert column out of Chad, and the division wasn’t formed until August 1943 in Morocco. The French Ministry of Defence also points out there’s no written record of the words from the time at all — Leclerc reconstructed the wording later, once he’d kept it.

Which somehow makes it better, not worse. A monument that gets its own facts slightly wrong because it was carved by people who cared more about what the thing meant than about the paperwork.

Twenty yards away, a white milestone with a domed top and a ring of stars. If you’ve driven round Normandy you’ll have seen dozens like it and assumed it’s a Voie de la Liberté borne. It isn’t — and I nearly captioned it wrongly.

Read it and it says FRANCE · BORNE N°1 · DU SERMENT DE KOUFRA. This is the start of the Voie de la 2e DB, a separate route that traces Leclerc’s division from this beach through Paris to Strasbourg. It was set up in 2004 on the initiative of the mayor of Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, deliberately modelled on the American road, and there are well over a hundred of them now.

The two routes meet on this beach and go different ways. The Voie de la Liberté runs east to Bastogne with Patton’s Third Army; Borne 00 of it stands a few kilometres south by the Roosevelt café. The Voie de la 2e DB runs to a cathedral in Alsace because of a promise made in a desert.

The vehicles at the monument carry the names — an M8 armoured car called Koufra, a Sherman called Normandie, a half-track called Témara after the camp in Morocco where the division was formed. The 2e DB named its vehicles after its own history and drove that history across Europe painted on the side.

One caveat, since I’d rather be accurate than romantic: these are not the actual vehicles that came ashore here. The Sherman is a genuine wartime M4A2 — the right diesel model, the one the division really used — and it wears the right name and the right badge. But I can find nothing that documents this particular hull as having landed in Normandy or served with the division, and the same goes for the M8. They’re commemorations wearing the right uniform, and I’d assumed otherwise until I went looking.

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The tools of the trade that day were the Fujifilm X-T2 and the XF18-55mm, shot in monochrome and finished in Lightroom.

The wire on the post above the beach is in the shop as a print and as a high-resolution download (download) — the last frame of the series. The whole series, Normandy, 1944 — the prints → the downloads →

Any photo on this site is available as a print. → Ask me.

Previously in this series: Pointe du Hoc and Sainte-Mère-Église. The 2019 Normandy posts run from Pegasus Bridge through Ranville to Omaha Beach — where, as it turns out, I photographed the same design of monument without knowing it.

If you'd rather have one of these on a wall than a screen — prints from €99.99, Ilford or Baryta paper, made by WhiteWall in Berlin. The shop →